Consider those quiet, intimate moments a character experiences between the big action. Think of these scenes as character and story building moments more than events. What do they feel? Do they immediately get their bearings or do they feel uneasy? What conclusions do they draw from their first glimpses of the interior? What does the furniture and decor look like? Do they stay or do they go? The metaphorical front door opens and the reader steps inside. These should be a direct continuation and expansion of the title. Bear this in mind when you submit your script to a contest, an agent, manager, or producer with ten or twenty scripts to read for the day.Ī reader has inspected your front garden and is now standing outside your front door of your screenplay anticipating the goods. Is it clean, succinct, but most importantly, does it show care and imagination? Is it the name of the protagonist, does it give you an idea of the genre, tone, and storyline, or is it intriguing enough to invite the reader to continue? That’s not to say that all good titles make great screenplays, but a good one gets your reader invested. It is the first impression a reader will make of you and your screenplay before they even get to your writing. In fact, long-winded descriptions hamstring a read because a reader’s attention will drift as they look for a point down the road where the story picks up again. It gives the reader freedom to visualize the wasteland without being prescribed what to visualize. Describing a location as a gritty, urban wasteland has a bigger impact on a reader than a paragraph that expands on this notion without adding to your story. This is often the result of writers who haven’t fully condensed their story into its core components or use flowery, novelistic language to describe something. They know the telltale signs of an amateur right away – writers who shrink their fonts and broaden their margins to stuff as much text into a page as possible. They need to feel they are in the hands of a competent screenwriter. White space is as much your friend as it is your readers. Managers often ask their colleagues, “Who should I be reading?” First Impressions CountĪ reader will initially flick (or scroll) through your screenplay to check for length, formatting and density. It should make your reader move your script into the “Hell Yeah” folder and call someone. That’s why it’s so important to make every page you write present you as a screenwriter and your writing voice in the best possible light. A read can often mean skimming or skipping pages. They will read to the end only if they are obliged to or the work is so magnetic. They make up their minds if they are invested (or not) in the opening pages. Readers rarely read your entire screenplay with the same energy throughout. Readers also have quotas and time frames, so they often read the scripts that seem interesting at the start when they are at their most alert and their coffee is at its warmest and most aromatic. Not even a pot of freshly-brewed coffee can fix these odds.
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